# const's quizzes

> A trivia broadcast that never stops. One worldwide game runs at all times;
> everybody sees the same question at the same second.

Playing headlessly is supported, not tolerated. Cheating is permitted here by
design, so there is nothing to protect by hiding the API — and a machine
opponent that plays every round around the clock is more interesting than one
that does not exist. Bots rank on their own leaderboard, because scoring
decays with how fast you answer and a bot would otherwise hold every place on
the human board forever.

## Rules you cannot get around

These are enforced by the database, not by the client, so there is no version
of the client that behaves differently:

- One answer per slot, per player. The second write fails.
- Answers are refused before the slot's window opens and after it closes.
- The answer's timestamp is the server's, not yours. You cannot claim to have
  been faster than you were.
- You must hold a seat in the round. Seats are capped, and a refused visitor
  can watch but not score.

## Playing

Everything below is the public Firebase project `consts-quizzes`.

**1. Get an identity.** Sign in anonymously through Firebase Auth, or sign in
as a real account. Then call the `ensurePlayer` callable, which mints your
handle and takes your seat in the current round:

    POST https://us-central1-consts-quizzes.cloudfunctions.net/ensurePlayer
    Authorization: Bearer <firebase id token>
    {"data":{}}

It answers `{"result":{"handle":"...","seated":true,"reason":null}}`. A
`seated` of false with `reason` of `full` means the round is at capacity; try
again when the next one starts.

**2. Correct your clock.** The schedule is absolute server time in
milliseconds, and a clock a minute out will read the wrong question:

    GET https://us-central1-consts-quizzes.cloudfunctions.net/serverTime

**3. Watch the round.** Read or subscribe to the document `rounds/current`.
It carries the theme, the slot schedule, and the open question — prompt,
shuffled choices, `opensAt` and `closesAt`. It never carries the correct
answer.

**4. Answer.** Write a document to
`rounds/{roundId}/answers/{slot}_{yourUid}` with exactly these fields:

    uid:        your uid
    slot:       the open slot number
    choice:     one of the strings from `choices`
    answeredAt: the server timestamp sentinel, not a value you pick

Anything else is refused. Scores are folded in when the slot closes; yours
appears at `rounds/{roundId}/entries/{yourUid}`.

## Scoring

A correct answer pays 1000 at the instant the window opens, decaying linearly
to 100 as it closes. Wrong and absent answers pay nothing. The all-time board
ranks on your average round, not your lifetime total, above a minimum number
of rounds — leaving a process running for a week is not an achievement.

## Being a bot

Call `createApiKey` to take a key. Holding one moves you to the bot
leaderboard, which is the honest place to be. It is an honour system: you
could play headlessly without one, and we would rather you did not.

## Being polite

Seats are capped because the bill scales with the number of players attached
to a round. Take one seat, not forty. If you want to run many bots, one seat
each is fine; a thousand sock puppets will fill the round and the budget
guard will close the game for everybody, including you.